If Armand hoped to challenge the Makenzie regime, Karl's lack of an heir was not his only problem.
Whatever the Seven Worlds might say about their independence, the center of power was still on Earth.
As, two thousand years ago, men had once gone to Rome in search of justice, or prestige, or knowledge, so in this age the Imperial planet called to its scattered children. No man could be taken seriously in the arena of Solar politics unless he was personally acquainted with the key figures of Terran affairs, and had traced his way at least once through the labyrinth of the terrestrial bureaucracy.
And to do this, one had to go to Earth; as in the days of the Caesars, there was no alternative. Those who believed otherwise — or pretended to — risked being tagged with the dreaded word “colonial.”
It might have been different if the velocity of light were infinite; but it was a mere billion kilometers an hour — and therefore, realtime conversation would be forever impossible between Earth and anyone
beyond the orbit of the Moon. The global electronic village which had existed for centuries on the mother world could never be extended into space; the political and psychological effects of this were enormous, and still not fully understood.
For generations, earth-dwellers had been accustomed to being in each other's presence at the touch of
a button. The communications satellites had made possible, and then inevitable, the creation of the World State in all but name. And despite many earlier fears, it was a state still controlled by men, not by
machines.
There were perhaps a thousand key individuals, and ten thousand important ones — and they talked to
each other incessantly from Pole to Pole. The decisions needed to run a world sometimes had to be made in minutes, and for this the instantaneous feedback of face-to-face conversation was essential. Across a fraction of a light-second, that was easy to arrange, and for three hundred years men had taken it for granted that distance could no longer bar them from each other.
But with the establishment of the first Mars Base, this intimacy had ended. Earth could talk to Mars
— but its words would always take at least three minutes to get there, and the reply would take just as long. Conversation was thus impossible, and all business had to be done by Telex or its equivalent.
In theory, this should have been good enough, and usually it was. But there were disastrous
exceptions — costly and sometimes fatal interplanetary misunderstandings resulting from the fact that the two men at the opposite ends of the circuit did not really know each other, or comprehend each other's ways of thought, because they had never been in personal contact.
And personal contact was essential at the highest levels of statesmanship and administration.
Diplomats had known this for several thousand years, with their apparatus of missions and envoys and
official visits. Only after that contact, with its inevitable character evaluation, had been made, and the subtle links of mutual understanding and common interest established, could one do business by long-distance communications with any degree of confidence.
Malcolm Makenzie could never have achieved his own rise on Titan without the friendships made
when he had returned to Earth. Once he had thought it strange that a personal tragedy should have led
him to power and responsibility beyond all the dreams of his youth; but unlike Ellen, he had buried his dead past and it had ceased to haunt him long ago.
When Colin had repeated the pattern, forty years later, and had returned to Titan with the infant
Duncan, the position of the clan had been immensely strengthened. To most of the human race, Saturn's
largest moon was now virtually identified with the Makenzies. No one could hope to challenge them if he could not match the network of personal contacts they had established not only on Earth, but everywhere else that mattered. It was through this network, rather than official channels, that the Makenzies, as even their opponents grudgingly admitted, Got Things Done.
And now a fourth generation was being prepared to consolidate the dynasty. Everyone knew that this
would happen eventually, but no one expected it so soon.
Not even the Makenzies. And especially not the Helmers.
6
By The Bonny, Bonny Banks of Loch Hellbrew
In the past, Duncan had always cycled to Grandmother Ellen's home, or taken an electric cart
whenever he had to deliver some household necessity. This time, however, he walked the two-kilometer
tunnel from the city, carrying fifty kilos of carefully distributed mass — which, however, only gave him ten kilos of extra weight. Had he known that such characters had once existed, he might have felt a strong affinity with old-time smugglers, wearing a stylish waistcoat of gold bars.
Colin had presented him with the complex harness of webbing and pouches, with a heartfelt "Thank